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By Jim Logan
After October’s NOWRA conference in Cleveland (a very
underrated city, by the way), I headed down to central Kentucky
to visit family. I was excited to see my mom and brother,
sure, but I was also eager to see what sort of onsite system
was put on his new farm.
It’s not hard to see why. I’d just spent three
days talking to smart men and women about some very clever
systems. There were ATUs of every kind, high-tech tanks, innovative
dispersal units—you name it. One or a combination of
those, surely, would be taking care of business in the heart
of the Bluegrass.
I knew the soil in the area could present a challenge. A
thick limestone bulge sits near or at the surface, and the
soil, although fertile, can be a rather slow-percolating clay.
Might be a nice challenge for a designer, I figured. I was
excited.
And then I got to the farm.
His brand-new OWTS had all the sophistication of a hole in
the ground, which is basically what it was. The “system”
consisted of a 1,000-gallon concrete septic tank and the “pond”óa
hole in the ground into which drained effluent straight from
the tank.
It was appalling.
The pond was about 15 feet across, 10 feet wide and 8 feet
deep. About 6 feet up the side a 4-inch piece of PVC protruded.
That, my brother said, was for overflow, which would somehow
percolate into the soil that the installer told him was too
clayey for a leach field. At the bottom of the lagoon was
a pool of effluent.
The tank was a mess. Although corners poked through, the
rest of it was covered in a foot of haphazardly dumped dirt
and none of the ports or manhole was visible. It already stunk.
It didn’t help that my brother had been given virtually
no information on how to keep his system in shape. He was
surprised to hear that bleach and septic tanks are a bad mix.
To be fair, my brother was happy with the system. Like me,
he’s basically a city boy, and his experience with waste
systems has been largely flushing a toilet and trying to remember
to put the seat down. He had no idea there were other options
beyond the lagoon; the installer told him what he needed and
that was that.
And it was definitely a bargain compared to a state-of-the-art
advanced system. As a working guy with two kids, my brother
isn’t in a position to drop big money on an ATU or a
constructed wetland. You can’t blame him for going with
a bargain.
Nor am I trying to suggest this was a case of malfeasance.
Kentucky, with one of the highest percentages of OWTSs in
the country, finds his hole in the ground perfectly acceptable.
Approval of technologies is a local matter, and the willingness
to embrace new thinking in decentralized treatment varies
greatly from county to county. Fresh thinking in rural Kentucky
is … spotty, shall we say.
And yet there was something barbaric about the whole thing,
something quick and dirty and lowest common denominator. It
smelled like trouble.
This industry already struggles against a bias that says
onsite systems are smelly disasters waiting to happen. Open
lagoonsóespecially when other, cost-effective options are
availableódon’t help.
One of the major themes at NOWRA was the need for standards
in the industry. Without them we see work of inconsistent
quality that reflects badly on everybody. But they’ll
need to be more than performance codes for equipment. Communication
and education are crucial elements in providing quality service.
Clients need to know what their options are, and they need
to be educated in how to ensure their system’s performance.
It’s not too much to ask.
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